Water levels expected to rise in Georgian Bay

Huntsville Forester

PARRY SOUND – The International Joint Commission (IJC) now has a report on the future management of the Great Lakes water levels to consider.
The commission’s study board presented its final report of a five-year study looking at management of the outflow of water from Lake Superior and the water levels in the Great Lakes.
The proposal the board made is to replace the a 1977A plan with a new Lake Superior Regulation Plan 2012 that changes how power dams and gates, in both the U.S. and Canada, are managed to control water levels in the Great Lakes.
“The key word there is robust,” said study board spokesperson John Nevin. “The new plan works better under different weather conditions than the old plan. So, if it’s substantially wetter or substantially drier it will work better, because it allows for some more flexibility.”
For example, if conditions remain dry, which could impact fish spawning in the St. Marys River and hinder the passage of ships, the plan provides for enough water to allow passage when it’s very dry, Nevin said.
In the lower Great Lakes, concern over managing water levels has to do with damage from flooding, but here in Parry Sound and Georgian Bay the issue isn’t too much water, but not enough.
Part of that is attributed to the land Parry Sound is on rising about 10 inches every century after the glaciers that created the Great Lakes receded, said Nevin.
“So, the lakes appear lower,” said Nevin. “But, that’s not only a problem for Parry Sound, because your lakes are going to keep getting lower as you get older – in the other end of the basin, say Chicago or Milwaukee or Indiana…it’s also rising but not at as fast a rate, so the whole basin is sloping a bit.”
1970s
While Georgian Bay’s water level has been low for about 10 years, that isn’t expected to get worse; instead, a rise to levels similar to those as in the ‘70s is expected.
“Levels are going to be in the range they have been in the past,” he said. “Where people remember them when they were kids.”
The board had two objectives: to study to affects of the dredging of the St. Clair River, done in 2009, and the second review of the regulation of Lake Superior water flow and its impact on water levels of the Great Lakes.
The final report was released to the public on March 28.
The report looked at the idea of installing underwater dykes in the St. Clair River to increase water levels, but the board didn’t make a recommendation on whether they should or shouldn’t be installed. It is the IJC that will make a recommendation to the federal governments at a later date, said Nevin.
“The problem is, that’s again also lake sturgeon spawning habitat there, in the St. Clair River, so when we, just as we had public meetings … we had people wary, saying, ‘don’t do anything in the river there,’” he said. “That’s why the commission is examining all the information the study board has given it.”
The study board did recommend to the IJC that it create a Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Levels Advisory Board to end large studies every couple of decades and adapt a management strategy with six core initiatives.
“If there were clear cut models that said ‘Okay, everything is going to be lower’ then they would have had a comfort level saying ‘Yes, we should move ahead with some sort of structures’, but since there was such a varying range of potential scenarios in the future they thought it would be best to say ‘let’s come up with a regulation plan that deals with all sorts of different scenarios, do the best with the structures we have but not recommend any new structure, but finally say, let’s recommend an adapting management plan that puts all the players together, federal, provincial, local, to talk about and monitor the situation so instead of having a study like this every 20/25 years we figure out what’s going on, you have regular meetings, you have this new advisory board and people are keeping track of this on a regular basis and then you can make decisions that adapt to changing water levels in the future,’” he said.
The IJC will hold public consultations this summer around the Great Lakes on the study before making a final recommendation to the Canadian and American governments. One of those meetings is expected in Parry Sound.
Response to the report is mixed.
“We support the new regulation plan for Lake Ontario and hope the commissioners can find a solution for the middle lakes that will allow their now stranded wetlands due to the sustained low water levels to begin to function again with natural fluctuations in water levels,” said John Jackson of Great Lakes United in a Sierra Club press release.
While the Great Lakes United supports the plan, a McMaster University professor doesn’t.
“We cannot allow these sustained low water level conditions to continue. The Study did not provide the funding for the research to determine if and how the (Georgian Bay) wetlands can adapt under these conditions,” said Dr. Pat Chow-Fraser, Professor of Biology and Director of Life Sciences, McMaster University in the same Sierra Club press release. “The proposal to create wetlands where they do not currently exist is naive and wrong-headed, and ignores the fact that many fish return to the same wetlands to spawn year after year, and more importantly that the thousands of wetlands that currently exist in eastern and northern Georgian Bay have taken thousands of years to develop. Attempts by humans to manipulate natural conditions often fail because of lack of understanding of the dynamics of ecosystems. We cannot and should not support these unrealistic recommendations.”
The Sierra Club highlighted concerns with calculations of water flow through the St. Clair River used by the study board and said it exaggerated “the downstream impacts of model simulations to restore Michigan/Huron/Georgian Bay waters to their pre-1962 levels and normal fluctuations.”
“Recently the Commissioners of the IJC proposed a new regulation that will help restore Lake Ontario’s the upper St. Lawrence River’s wetlands. We are confident that the Commissioners will reject the adapt by diking recommendation of the IUGLS Board with regard to Georgian Bay’s wetlands. Instead, a responsible plan must and can be found to restore the water levels of Lakes Michigan/Huron/Georgian Bay to their pre-1962 state and normal fluctuations. We agree with the Study Board on one point - for both economic and environmental reasons, multi-lake regulation is not the answer,” said Mary Muter, chair of Great Lakes Section of Sierra Club Ontario, in a press release.